Samsung Galaxy M30 Detailed Review 2019

Samsung made it quite clear at the launch of the Galaxy M series this new series is targeted at youthful millennials, a marketplace that has been captured by Chinese smartphone manufacturers for a couple of years now. To be able to conquer this particular audience, the Samsung M series phones have aggressive prices in contrast to older Samsung models, in addition to notched screens, double or triple camera setups, and big batteries. Samsung currently has the Galaxy M10 (Overview ) and Galaxy M20 (Inspection ) in the market catering to the sub-Rs.

While we already know how competitive the cheap smartphone marketplace might get, is your Samsung Galaxy M30 able to take down the contest? We put it to the test to learn.

Samsung Galaxy M30 Specifications

It’s a teardrop notch in the top which Samsung refers to as the Infinity-U screen. The phone sports a big 6.4-inch Super AMOLED display with narrow bezels at the top and the sides and a milder bottom chin. Samsung has transferred the earpiece towards the framework of the telephone, and it is as broad as the top notch.

Samsung has opted for a plastic unibody for the Galaxy M30, also offers it in 2 colors, Gradation Blue and Gradation Black. We had the Gradation Blue variant for review that had a nice blue gradient physically. Samsung has curved the surfaces of the telephone making it comfortable to hold in the hand. The corners are also curved so that they do not dig into your palms.

The volume and power buttons are set on the best of this Samsung Galaxy M30 and extend great clicky feedback. We found the power button to be well placed, but reaching the volume buttons needed a fast shuffle in the hand. To the left of this device is your SIM tray that has two Nano-SIM slots and a committed microSD card slot.

At the top, the Samsung Galaxy M30 only has a mic hole, whereas the 3.5millimeter headphone jack, USB Type-C jack, and loudspeaker are placed at the base. The phone has an oval-shaped fingerprint scanner in the back that we believed is a little too high, which makes it inconvenient to achieve. There’s a triple camera set up at the back, which sits flush with the body. The selfie flash is placed right beneath the camera module.

You get a 15W charger in the box which should be in a position to top up the phone fairly quickly.

The Galaxy M30 sports a large 6.4-inch Super AMOLED display using a full-HD+ resolution (1080×2340 pixels). The panel is crisp, has excellent viewing angles, and is also legible when outside. It’s a little notch in the middle of the top, which houses the selfie camera. Although it is small in size, it might bother some people. You do have the option to mask it by allowing the Hide Camera alternative in the display settings. It places a black bar on either side of the notch but doesn’t round the corners, which looks odd.

There are two variations of this Galaxy M30, one with 4GB RAM and 64GB of storage, along with the other with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. You do have the option to expand storage up to 512GB utilizing the committed microSD card slot.

Connectivity choices for the Galaxy M30 comprise Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS. The Galaxy M30 has two Nano-SIM slots also supports 4G in addition to VoLTE on both SIMs.

The Galaxy M30 comes with Samsung Experience 9.5 working on top of Android 8.1 Oreo which is a slightly outdated version of Android. Our review unit had the February security patch, which will be good, though we would have liked if Samsung sent this phone using OneUI and Android Pie like it will on the Galaxy A30$16,990 that is priced slightly higher compared to the Galaxy M30.

You receive a couple of apps from Samsung including Samsung Max, a data compression program; My Galaxy and the Galaxy Apps Store. We discovered the My Galaxy program to be spammy because it kept sending push notifications including ads and news. This got quite bothersome as the phone would show four to six alarms a day on topics ranging from sports and news to movie promotions. We did not opt in for this and didn’t find a choice to disable these. Finally, we needed to disable the My Galaxy app to stop these notifications, which is far from perfect.

During setup, it also asked us for permission to exhibit lock display stories — news stories, sponsored content, and much more on the lock display. It’s easy to overlook this during setup and enable them by default, though at least you are able to disable these later if desired. We did not empower Lock Screen Stories because we found these annoying when we analyzed the Samsung Galaxy M20.

Samsung has chopped in several handy gestures. You can swipe back on the fingerprint scanner to pull the notification shade down, and swipe to shut it. It is possible to double-tap to wake the display. Samsung’s Chat Over Video attribute lets you respond to notifications from some messaging apps like WhatsApp in a pop-up window whilst watching a movie. Gesture navigation can be available, but it merely replaces the navigation buttons together with swipe points

Samsung Galaxy M30 Performance, Battery Life, and Cameras

With day-to-day tasks, the phone showed no sign of slowing down or stuttering. We can multi-task efficiently with various apps in the background.

The fingerprint scanner is fast to unlock the smartphone, and there’s also face recognition which employs the selfie camera to open the telephone. Face recognition is not the quickest but does the work in most lighting conditions.

Dolby Atmos is available but it could only be enabled when using headphones. We found the loudspeaker for a little too soft when viewing videos and playing games.

To test gaming performance, we performed PUBG Mobile which defaulted to the Moderate preset with graphics set to Balanced and frame rate set to Moderate. We noticed lag at these settings while enjoying the game, and changed the graphics setting to Smooth. This removed lag and the game was playable.

We conducted several benchmarks to check the performance of the Galaxy M30. In contrast, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Pro scored 1,78,570 in AnTuTu and scored 2,389 and 6,593 in Geekbench 4’s single-core and multi-core tests. The grade scores from the Galaxy M30 were also slightly lower compared to those of their Asus ZenFone Max Guru M1$ 9,099 which is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 SoC.

Samsung Galaxy M30 Price:

The Galaxy M30 managed 22fps at GFXBench T-Rex and 7fps in GFXBench Manhattan 3.1. These scores are lower compared to Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Pro as well which is similarly priced. Concerning performance benchmarks, the Galaxy M30 scores less than a number of popular smartphones in this price range.

Samsung Galaxy M30 Battery Life:

This phone constitutes its average performance by providing good battery life. With a 5000mAh battery onboard, it may go on for a really long time without having to be plugged. Together with our use, which consisted of employing the Galaxy M30 for navigation for near 5 hours watching a few videos, and utilizing an active Whatsapp accounts, the telephone easily lasted for more than a day and a half-hour.

This is a great time and is higher than that of the Asus ZenFone Max Pro M1 however, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Pro tops the Galaxy M30 in 19 hours and 23 minutes. When you do run out of power, the provided fast charger is useful. It managed to charge the phone to 23 percent in 30 minutes and 46 percent in one hour. It took more than two hours to load the phone entirely.

The triple camera setup on the Galaxy M30 is made up of a 13-megapixel primary camera having an f/1.9 aperture, a 5-megapixel depth sensor with an f/2.2 aperture, and also a 5-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera with a 123-degree field of view. For selfies, this mobile has a 16-megapixel sensor using an f/2.0 aperture.

Samsung’s camera program is straightforward and easy to use. You’ll find toggles laid out in the base while the different modes are on top. The camera has Panorama, Guru, Beauty, Live Focus, Stickers, and Continuous Shot modes. In Pro mode, it lets you set exposure, ISO, and white balance before taking a photo, and Decals enables you to add AR stickers onto your subject. Live Focus puts the thickness sensor to work with and lets you set the degree of background blur. You can use beautification filters and tweak numerous settings manually or enable Smart Beauty to your phone to manage beautification itself.

Pictures taken with the Galaxy M30 were on par with what we have seen from a few of those other mobiles within this budget. The shots we made in the day were sharp and had good details. The phone was able to focus and set the exposure right. Objects in a distance were still observable.

When shooting against the light, we noticed chromatic aberration. The phone could manage decent separation between backgrounds and subjects in macro shots. But, we discovered that the telephone would aggressively boost the reds shots, causing some of them to seem artificial.

The ultra-wide-angle detector is beneficial to capture broader subjects or groups of issues, but as it lacks autofocus it is used for landscape shots. It did introduce barrel distortion in a few photos we took, but Samsung provides a contour correction option in the gallery to sort this out. This sensor, however, doesn’t capture details as well as the primary sensor.

We shot some portraits utilizing the Live Focus mode and were happy with the output. You also get the option to change the level of blur and add effects to those pictures in the gallery.

The low-cost camera performance of the Galaxy M30 has been average. Pictures had low noise but there was fine grain This could be down to a competitive sound reduction algorithm. Objects at a distance weren’t very recognizable, but this is okay at this price.

Selfies taken with the 16-megapixel front camera had good detail. We also used the Live Focus mode for a bokeh impact and in spite of being only a single front camera, the Galaxy M30 managed great edge detection.